Category: Rockville

I attended a community meeting (10/9/2018) to discuss Rockville Town Square and Town Center this evening. Many thanks to Mayor Newton, the City Council, city staff, the Rockville Chamber of Commerce, Federal Realty Investment Trust, and VisArts for making it happen. It was an important meeting — hopefully the first of many.

So many important local elected officials attended: Mayor Bridget Newton, City Councilmembers Beryl Feinberg, Virginia Onley, Julie Palakovich Carr, and Mark Pierzchala, State Senator Cheryl Kagan, State Delegate Kumar Barve, County Councilmembers Marc Elrich and Sidney Katz. I also saw former Mayor Larry Giammo and former City Councilmember Tom Moore. I am certain I missed others who were there that I just did not see.

I did not intend to make any significant reports, but it seemed like it might be helpful to do so. So I started to keep track of the statements that jumped out at me. This is just my own list of what struck me — it is not complete nor comprehensive. I organized the statements into “concerns,” “ideas for solutions,” and “other thoughts.” They are roughly in order that I heard them or thought to jot them down. Others can add to them.

Think about how you want to spend your money the next time you shop online

Other ideas:

Properly identify the problem first — what problem are we trying to solve?

Federal Realty should do more to develop relationships with current business tenants (“how is it going, how was your month?”)

A resident: “I want t be on a committee” that works on this

West side of 270 (and elsewhere outside of the central area) disenfranchised

This meeting could have been a conversation not just a feedback session; residents have questions that could be answered and discussed in the room instead of waiting for an email response

Another meeting in two weeks

My own thoughts: The concerns and energy expressed by the standing-room and overflow crowd were overwhelming. I hope that we can turn this from an initial discussion into something more meaningful. It would be a mistake, I think, to leave everything in the hands of JUST the City, or JUST Federal Realty. I think some sort of ongoing mechanism for shared responsibility between the City, Federal Realty, local business owners, community members, and others would be a great step. If we had a way to create a sense of joint ownership of our shared space — tonight’s energy convinces me we would ALL benefit.

As one resident said, enthusiastically: “I want to be on a committee that works on this!” I hope many others do, too.